Monthly Archives: September 2013

Adobe’s new rental based software delivery system, (Creative Cloud) is okay for me personally, since I always need the most recent copy of Photoshop and Illustrator and require access to them on both Windows and Mac. I also use several of their other apps as well although not as often.

For the average user however, such as YOU, Adobe is certainly raping your bank account to fatten theirs.

So big deal, all their programs are available to you on both platforms for $50 per month. They make this “benefit” sound like its the second coming of some sort of messiah.

But the fact is, most only require Photoshop and Illustrator, and upgrading those two products every 4 years for about $375 is usually sufficient. Note that Adobe doesn’t offer an Illustrator – Photoshop only package as they do with Lightroom – Photoshop, as if they did, their Creative Cloud full package sales would decline expeditiously.

Winner – Adobe. And for those with snarky ideas on using an alternative, could you tell me exactly what that alternative happens to be? And please don’t respond with some garbage like Gimp or inefficient and buggy Corel products. Are you kidding me? There are no real alternatives. And Adobe knows it, which sucks.

The only mild threat to Photoshop took place many years ago with a product named Macromedia xRes which was consumed by Adobe, killed and re-coded into Fireworks.

So, hold onto those CS5 DVD’s for as long as you can or CS6 DVD’s for those lucky enough to have gotten their hands on them, as the days of budgeting your Adobe dollars are long gone.

The legacy of our modern day Edison, Steve Jobs continues as California considers declaring the childhood home of the former Apple CEO an historical landmark.

The Los Altos Historical Commission discussed designating the house at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos an “historical landmark” at a meeting held on Monday. Steve Jobs spent part of his childhood and teenage years at the single-story California ranch-style home.

In a 26 page report, the commission described the property’s key role in the development of the first Apple computers. Citing Walter Isaacson’s popular biography of Jobs and a card catalog at Stanford University, the report noted that the first 50 Apple 1 computers were assembled at the property for Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop in nearby Mountain View.

The report also explained that some of the first Apple investors came to the property for a demonstration of the Apple 2 computer.

Jobs moved to the property with his parents in 1968 and attended the local middle school in seventh grade, according to the report. He went on to attend nearby Homestead High School, where he met fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

The Historical Commission anticipates making a decision on the site’s status at its meeting by December

The house was also used as a location in the movie Jobs, the recent Steve Jobs biography. Jobs, who stepped down as Apple CEO in August 2011, was 56 years old when he lost his long battle with pancreatic cancer in October of that year.

So, you’re lucky enough to own a computer that’s getting a little old and running like crap? Join the club, we all have one or more of these that for one reason or another we continue to use.

I’m sure its been checked multiple times for viruses and malware and its all squeaky clean. Probably even looked into disk fragmentation and other disk related issues and everything is A-OK! But still, this system continues to run like a pig with three legs.

So, exactly what should be done to bring some life back to your old friend and maybe save you a few bucks and avoid having to replace this system with something new?

Simple, buy a new, bigger internal hard disk and clone your current disk to it! Its a fast, easy and cheap way to bring a ton of life back to an aging system.

Why does this help? Quite simply, even though your original disk checks out okay, its seek and write times are slowing down and whatever utility that was employed to check fragmentation and other issues, well, don’t believe it.

That old disk is littered with bad data and broken files beyond belief which is sending the read/write heads into a break dance and believe-it-or-not, writing all data in a single contiguous stream to a new drive actually assists in repairing some of these issues.

After years of use, there’s no repairing the worn drive and once the dreaded, unexplained and excessive disk activity begins which brings your old system to a crawl, the device is on its last legs and will most likely fail at the worst possible time.

What to do is pick up a 1 TB Seagate internal hard drive for about $65 and download the free Seagate DiskWizard software from their site. Make sure to follow the insructions carefully. This software makes it easy and painless to clone your internal drive to the new device so there’s no need to reinstall the operating system, applications, etc. (Laptops require an external USB cloning kit to attach the new drive to during the cloning process)

I’ve done this with several systems, both about 5 years old and although it didn’t magically convert them to like-new reponsiveness, I would estimate that overall speed was increased by 50% along with the system booting and ready for use at least 5x faster.